The Sci Fi Guy

Well, thanks to a break in my schedule, I’m taking a little vacation this week. Of course no vacation would be okay without some reading - so I’m going to bring with me the Solaris Short Fiction Volume 2 that I’m still working on. My Volume 1 arrived a couple days ago, so hopefully I can get to that sometime soon this summer.

Hope everyone enjoyed a great Memorial Day weekend! See you in a week or so.

The short and sweet? This is a bad movie. It’s one of those movies where you really have to wonder - how did it make it past the pitch? let alone actually get cast, produced, edited, distributed, and finally make it in front of me? Aren’t there rooms full of smart people in Hollywood getting paid large sums of money to make sure that they don’t produce crap?

(Nevermind, I’m pretty sure said room and said people don’t exist)

Anyways, welcome to Fantastic 4, edition 2, Rise of the Silver Surfer. I want to preface this post by stating that I did not purchase FF4, rent it, or in any way actually decide this was worth a shot. It was on HBO. Late. And I wasn’t tired. And uhm… (working on further excuses)… I lost a bet. And Jessica Alba is in it. Yeah, that’s it! I watched it to see Jessica Alba.

The story begins with a planet being destroyed. A surfer flies away from it, en route to Earth. We’re doomed. Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman (Alba) are getting married. And wouldn’t you know it - the Silver Surfer ruins the whole thing. What a bastard. Now it’s personal. There are two funny parts of the movie - one of them involves Stan Lee during the wedding scene (it’s always good to see a cameo).

Anyways, the moral of this review is don’t bother. There’s nothing near the entertainment value of some of the other comic book hero movies. Hell, I’d rather watch Ben Affleck in Daredevil than this again, and frankly that should say a lot. Hopefully we can all band together and ask Hollywood nicely to stop making this crap.

I’ll admit this much - I’ve never read a Harry Potter book in my life. I cringe at the thought. I watched the first movie (sans book) and thought it was pretty dull. But part of me really appreciates what that series of books has done - by turning on a lot of kids to reading. Just getting a child’s face in to a book these days seems like a daunting challenge, especially in the vastly more connected world of today.

Coming in October is another movie adaptation of a children’s book - The City of Ember. The premise is made of the stuff I love - mankind has lost the ability to live on the surface of Earth, and so has constructed a city (Ember) miles underground for mankind’s survivors. Only catch? The city only lasts 200 years. When the time is up, presumably, the planet will be ready for humans again.

Featuring a pretty good cast including Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, and Martin Landau (amongst others), this looks like a great flick for the scifi-minded children. I was fortunate to grow up with titles like Tron, Willow, The Neverending Story, and Labyrinth (thanks for creeping me out David Bowie), and I think Ember might be just the movie to capture the imagination for kids of many ages. I’m keeping my fingers crossed this earns a PG rating to ensure that even the young ones can give it a shot - and of course I hope many parents will encourage their children to read the book before going to see the movie. Nothing’s better than instilling in an entire generation the joy of saying, “Meh, the book was better.”

So to continue my updates on upcoming summer movies - (a) no I haven’t seen Iron Man yet, and (b) I’m really looking forward to the new X-Files sequel. Turns out since I last blogged on it Fox has gone ahead and updated the X-Files Website, featuring a standard-issue trailer. Lots of strung-together quotes, flashy action sequences truncated to amplify the thing, and of course, the X-Files music. It’s enough just to get the music, actually.

The plot appears to have something to do with maybe a telepath - someone that can see things that have happened or are about to happen. And thankfully we get a return of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson - not to mention original writing by Chris Carter (the creator of the franchise). Of course, I guess franchise ownership doesn’t mean much from the reviews I’m reading about Indiana Jones 4. Anyways, stay tuned for XFiles 2, hitting theaters July 25th.

Traveling is one of my favorite pasttimes, but almost as much as the destination matters to me, the journey oftentimes provides me the unique time to actually open a novel and relax. Over the last couple years, I’ve realized that perhaps my favorite form of science fiction is actually the short-fiction style. Maybe it’s me being a greedy reader, but I enjoy the fact I can sit down and bounce from universe to universe, storyline to storyline, character to character, without necessarily having to spend hours to get the jist of what the author is trying to say. And more often than not, I catch myself appreciating how the author formulated his or her story in a way to make it compact yet enjoyable.

I wanted to share some impressions from the book that I recently picked up titled, Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2. This is a completely original anthology of work, featuring a range of topics and writing styles.

The first story is iCity by Paul Di Filippo, an intriguing tale of high-speed, web-enabled urban planning. The most notable part about what Mr. Di Filippo did in this story is that he jumped right in to the story, then backed out with the background process of how a city can actually be upgraded and downgraded on a whim, and also managed to tell a pretty interesting character story as well.

The third story is The Line of Dichotomy by Chris Robertson, which features a war-torn planet on the brink of peace and terraforming. Perhaps I read this too quickly after watching the movie rendition of Screamers (a Philip K. Dick story), but the setup of the setting seemed damned similar. However, that doesn’t make it an interesting read, and the climax at the ending is enough to make you wonder whether or not we’ll ever be wise enough to give up violence for coexistance with each other.

Not to berate any of the other stories in this fine collection, but my favorite so far (and I admit I haven’t finished the book yet), is Sunworld by Eric Brown. This is definitely an author that’s been influenced by Arthur C. Clarke. It begins as one story and then slowly becomes another - with a climax that’s well worth the journey to get there.

I’d also note that Shining Armor by Dominic Green is another worthwhile story, but only if you grew up enjoying Robotech and other mech-related science fiction like I did. Essentially the story revolves around the notion that you should never underestimate someone - not everyone that appears strong is as strong as they appear.

Odds are I’ll finish the last few stories this weekend, and hopefully find some more good gems in this collection. I’ve already been so impressed by this 2nd edition that I went ahead and ordered the 1st volume from Amazon. Once that arrives, I’ll be sure to share those with you too.

The internet can be an interesting place if you spend enough time getting lost on it. Somehow I went from watching a video demonstration about a new video server that I was thinking about using, to discovering this little short film titled Things Fall Apart on a website called Devoid of Yesterday. It’s only about 2 and a half minutes long, but this artsy short features some provoking music, and frankly chilling visuals of a world not unlike our own.

The film has all the great elements of great science fiction short fiction… The sense that the piece we receive is far less than what might truly be out there. If you’ve got a couple minutes and want to see something off the beaten path, I suggest you give it a shot. Exciting editor’s note… I just created a new category called “Science Fiction ‘Web’”… Hopefully I’ll veer even further off the path and see if I can find some exciting scifi-stuff manifesting itself on the web.